The demand for rail transit “is strong all across the country,” says a new report from Reconnecting America. How do they know? They simply added up all the “planned and proposed fixed-guideway transit projects” they could find.
They found a total of 643 projects (1-mb Excel spreadsheet) in about 80 urban areas whose total costs were estimated to be $233 billion. Of these, 43 are under construction, 95 are in the engineering phase, 108 are doing an alternatives analysis, 358 are “future plans,” and 39 are “stalled.” If all of these projects were built, the group promises, they “would connect 3.5 million more jobs to transit, an increase of 25 percent.”
Wowee! Spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars (plus cost overruns) would connect transit to 2.5 percent of all jobs in the country. At that price, it would cost a mere $8.2 trillion to connect the remaining 82.5 percent of jobs to transit. That makes perfect sense in a Bizarro world considering Congress just killed President Obama’s high-speed rail plan to supposedly connect 80 percent of Americans for a mere half a trillion dollars.
